V0ldek @ V0ldek @awful.systems

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978

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2 yr. ago

Quantum computing reality vs quantum computing in popculture and marketing follows precisely the same line as quantum physics reality vs popular quantum physics.

• Reality: Mostly boring multiplication of matrices, big engineering challenges, extremely interesting stuff if you're a nerd that loves the frontiers of human knowledge
• Cranks: Literally magic, AntMan Quantummania was a documentary, give us all money

I think the end is way too generous. I don't think we deserve an end.

I've been thinking about this post for a full day now. It's truly bizzare, in a "I'd like to talk to this person and study their brain" kind of way.

Put aside the technical impossibility of LLMs acting as the agents he describes. That's small potatoes. The only thing that stays in my mind is this:

take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need

I can't even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.

I can't understand this. Like yes, of course, some times there's this moment where you think "god I remember there was this particular chart I saw" or "how many people lived in Tokio again?" or "I read exactly the solution to this problem on StackOverflow once". In the days of yore you'd write one Google query and you'd get it. Nowadays maybe you can find it on Wikipedia. Sure. But that doesn't actually take two minutes either, it's like an instant one-second thought of "oh I know I saw exactly this factoid somewhere". You don't read books for that though. Does this person think books are just sequences of facts you're supposed to memorise?

How on earth do you think of "precisely the information you need". What does that mean? How many problems are there in your life where you precisely know how the solution would look like, you just need an elaborate query through an encyclopedia to get it? Maybe this is useful if your entire goal is creating a survey of existing research into a topic, but that's a really small fraction of applications for reading a fucking book. How often do you precisely know what you don't know? Like genuinely. How can your curiosity be distilled into a precise, well-structured query? Don't you ever read something and go "oh, I never even thought about this", "I didn't know this was a problem", "I wouldn't have thought of this myself". If not then what the fuck are you reading??

I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books, because otherwise this gets more nonsensical. Like what do you ask your agents for, "did they indeed take the hobbits to Isengard? Prepare a comprehensive review of conflicting points of view."

This single point presumes that none of the reasons for you absorbing knowledge from other people is to use it in a creative way, get inspired by something, or just find out about something you didn't know you didn't know. It's something so alien to me, so detached from what I consider the human experience, I simply don't comprehend this. Is this a real person? How does the day-to-day life of this person look like? What goes on in their head when they read a book? What are we moving towards as a species?

There's something hauntingly beautiful in levelling "you also haven't been touched by a woman loser" against a married man with a child

We already have this, it's just a Tesla with "FSD" on

Changes during the day but it's always > 0.

Setting my oven to YOLO Mode and dying in a fire 7 seconds later

Lol, I'm a decision theorist because I had to decide whether I should take a shit or shave first today. I am also an author of a forthcoming book because, get this, you're not gonna believe, here's something Big Book doesn't want you to know:

literally anyone can write a book. They don't even check if you're smart. I know, shocking.

Plus "forthcoming" can mean anything, Winds of Winter has also been a "forthcoming" book for quite a while

Why did you have to make the strawberry sexy

I read the comments before the article and I thought I was about to read something with like a complicated narrative framing device but apparently HN chuds cannot disentangle a linear, first-person narrated blog post.

If you’re fine playing them on your PC, a remaster of the first two games is coming to Steam on June 10th.

Oh my god this is the best news I've heard this year

“I try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way

You could show me this without any context whatsoever and my first thought would've been "did a React dev say that"

My entire experience with Sony is that I loved Patapon on the PSP (I would sell my fucking soul to get it to play on a smartphone god) and I watch The Last of Us and that's it. None of their games exist as far as I'm concerned because I can't play them on PC. What, I'm going to play TLoU 2 without playing 1 or GoW 4 without playing 1-3? Go fuck yourselves.

Valhalla and Shadows are two of the best-selling Assassin's games even though they've been exactly equally as shit and tedious since Origin, so I'd put a [citation needed] on your "increasing irrelevancy".

Also which big game studios don't suck? The list you give below has, the top 10 largest in order,

• Sony (I guess defensible, idk),
• Tencent (lol), Microsoft (lmao)
• Nintendo (legal almost as predatory as Oracle)
• NetEase (???)
• EA, Epic, Take-Two (sincerely wishing prostate cancer to all three of those CEOs)
• MiHoYo (literally one gacha game), and
• ROBLOX CORPORATION.

Not to mention that DLSS is basically standard config these days for better performance.

Ye and that's a fucking travesty and everyone responsible for UE5 should be hanged. And this is the rational, levelled take from me, most people I know would not put it as mildly.

Since basically all graphics processing algorithms are linear algebra and all of ML is linear algebra but with a twist, I think fuzzy background removal is definitely AI.

This term is so meaningless you could call A* an "AI algorithm" at this fucking point

Hey look, it's this meme for the n-th time

Aren't you supposed to only use whatever "self-driving" nonsense they have on highways only? I thought Tesla explicitly says you can't do it on a normal road cause, well, it doesn't fucking work.

It doesn't even seem the driver is actually holding the wheel like they don't try to avoid that at all

Just a second before the crash a car goes by, this thing could've just as easily swerved right onto that other car and injured someone, someone should at least lose their license for this

If I were a half-a-billion-dollar scam I would simply not have audits taps forehead

For LLMs specifically? Code is not text, aside from the most clinical, dictionary definition of "text".

But even then, it also fails at writing coherent short or longform, so even if code was "just text" it'd fail equally badly.